High-Resolution Angle Tracking for Mobile Wideband Millimeter-Wave Systems With Antenna Array Calibration

Abstract

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) systems use directional beams to support high-rate data communications. Small misalignment between the transmit and receive beams (e.g., due to the mobility) can result in a significant drop of the received signal quality, especially in line-of-sight communication channels. In this paper, we propose and evaluate high-resolution angle tracking strategies for wideband mmWave systems with mobility. We custom design pairs of auxiliary beams as the tracking beams, and use them to capture the angle variations, toward which the steering directions of the data beams are adjusted. Different from conventional beam tracking designs, the proposed framework neither depends on the angle variation model nor requires an on-grid assumption. For practical implementation of the proposed methods, we examine the impact of the array calibration errors on the auxiliary beam pair design. Numerical results reveal that by employing the proposed methods, good angle tracking performance can be achieved under various antenna array configurations, channel models, and mobility conditions.